After 10 Years of 15-Year Fishing Ban, Mexico Park Sees Fish Population Explode

According to a recently released study, more than 10 years after the Cabo Pulmo National Park of Mexico banned fishing in its waters, the fish population has seen a 460 percent increase.

From 1999 to 2009 researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego studied the aquatic population made up of groupers, manta rays, snappers, trevally, and sharks and recorded that it had increased to amazing levels.

In 1995, those living around the water enforced a “no take” policy after Cabo Pulmo was almost completely without fish. Four years after the policy was enacted, the researchers checked the 71-square-kilometer marine park and found that its fish population was still very low.

Now, as of 2009, the fish are the highest they have been in years and have made the Cabo Pulmo the “most robust marine reserve in the world,” wrote the International Business Times.

The scientists’ study was published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE journal.